Migration versus Movement

• Migration
  • Permanent relocation of ones place of residence and generally considered to be a long distance move
  • Implies a degree of permanency
  • Temporary movements such as vacation are not considered migration
  • Moving is not necessarily migration
• International migration
  • Moving permanently from one country to another
• Internal migration
  • Occurs within a country
• Easy to see a large amount of people move from one area to another area, similarly
• Trends where large amounts of people move from place to place
• Movement is not permanent, migration is permanent
• Cyclical movements
  • When people move back and forth between two places or among a few locations
  • On a small scale, happens daily in work / school commutes
  • Season commutes mass
    • Retirees move to warmer places in winter, and head north when spring arrives
    • Farmers who move based on water and vegetables
• Periodic movement
  • Population moves often over long distances that occur from time to time but are not permanent
  • Semi-permanent
  • Similar to cyclical, length away from home is longer
  • Long distances, long period of time
  • Can include moving for college, or as a laborer
    • Laborers move to where work is
  • Guest workers allowed to enter a country for a specified period of time to work in certain industries
    • Economy where they live is not as well established
    • Plan to live in working country for certain amount of time
    • Remittances
      • Payments guest workers send back to their families/ home country
• Fear of immigrants
  • Sometimes countries are poorly prepared to accept large amounts of working immigrants even though they need laborers
  • Turks have been attacked in Europe, Germany, Austria, and Belgium
    • Fear of Muslim immigrants bringing extremists relatives
    • Fuels racism and anti-immigration from right wing politicians
  • Terrorist attacks in the name of Islam
    • Increased support for anti-Islam in countries such as France, Germany, Belgium
    • Opposition to immigration
  • Guest workers are needed economically, but governments need to prepare for social consequences
    • Could make sure that schools are integrated and expose people to different cultures

Types of migration

• Primitive migration
  • Occurs when human population run out of food
  • Common among hunters and gatherers
  • Environmental change, natural disasters, and plagues lead humans to search for food
• Mass migration
  • Group migration
  • Involves large group of people moving together
  • Can be community, ethnic tribe or group, an army
  • Colonization, such as British settling in North America
• Free migration
  • A decision to relocate permanently to another location without the coercion, support, or compulsion of any government or group in power
  • People decide to migrate without being forced to do so
  • Free migrants totaled over 40 million in the history of the US
    • Most mas been from Europe, but source has recently shifted to Latin America and Asia
• Restricted migration
  • Complex rules that limit the number of people who can cross their borders to seek residency
  • Migration is no longer free
  • US Emergency Quota Act of 1921
    • Restricted migrants from any country to 3% of the population from that country living in the United States in 1910
• Impelled and forced migration
  • Migrants pressured by government or another institution to move
  • Jews from Germany under Nazi Regime of the mid 1930s
  • German Jews forced to leave their homes to ghettos and extermination camps
  • Bringing millions of Africans to America as slaves
  • Trail of Tears
    • Forced internal migration
    • Native Americans from Georgia to Oklahoma in 1838 - 1839
  • Japanese Americans to internment camps in the 1940s
  • 18 million Africans migrated from East Africa to Arabian Peninsula between 7th and 19th centuries
  • Three Gorges Dam
    • During 1990s and 2000s, China has forced about 1.24 million people out of their homes for the construction of the Dam
    • Encouraging millions to leave areas of Yangtze River before 2020
• Rural to urban migration
  • Countries with low industrialization have urban populations that account for 24% to 40% of their total population
  • Industrialized countries have urbanized populations of over 75%
  • As a country’s economy industrializes, people move to cities
  • Fewer farmers to supply urban areas
• Measuring Migration
  • Gross migration
    • Most basic
    • The total number of people who leave and enter a country
  • Net migration
    • Difference between the number of people who leave and number of people who arrive
  • Out migration
    • Total number of people who leave a country
  • In migration
    • Total number of people who arrive

Human Trafficking

• Millions of humans are trafficked to work as prostitutes and bonded laborers
• Human Trafficking as defined by the United Nations:

Recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation

• Slavery rings uncovered United States, Canada, and many European countries
• 600,000 to 800,000 humans are trafficked across borders to work as domestic help, prostitutes, and laborers per year
• CIA estimates 50,000 people brought into US illegally each year
  • Most are women, half are children
• 3 broad areas are affected by human trafficking
• Destroys social institutions like the family
  • Culture cannot get passed down to younger generation
  • Trafficked children do not receive education
  • When they return, they may be ostracized for working in taboo position such as prostitution
• Fuels organized crime
  • $10 billion a year is generated from human trafficking
• “People smuggling” defined by Interpol:

The procurement, the financial gain, of the illegal entry into a state of which that person is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident

• In other words
  • Smugglers take money from migrants to sneak them in a country
  • On the rise
  • Horrific traveling conditions
    • Shipped inside shipping containers for weeks
  • Smugglers charge so many migrants can usually never pay it off
• Child soldiers
  • 300,000 children under 18 involved in over conflicts around the world
  • Children abducted by militia or government
    • Desensitize them to killing and death
  • May sometimes join willingly because they think it will better their lives
  • Forced to kill friends, killed by older members of group, rape, sexual abuse

Refugees

• Refugee as defined by US government:

any person who is outside any country of such persons nationality or , in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion

• Same as introduced in 1951 Geneva convention
• Until government where person travels to is declared a refugee, that person is an asylum seeker
• Internally displaced persons
  • People displaced from their homes in their home country
  • 24 million of these worldwide
• Refugee warehousing
  • Long term housing of refugees in a specific location without allowing them to assimilate into the receiving country
  • Temporary camps often become permanent
  • 67% of all refugees have been warehoused for 10+ years
• Major refugee movements for the past few years
  • Sudan, Burundi, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo
    • 400,000 refugees each living in other countries
  • 3.5 million refugees worldwide from Africa alone
• Camps
  • Camps range from 1000s to 100,000s
  • Must provide food, shelter, water, and sanitation
    • Goal of 2,100 Calories per person a day
  • One problem is fuel
  • Another is contaminated water
    • Treatment must prevent disease such as Cholera
  • Building latrines for thousands is difficult
  • Medical care is provided by international agencies
    • Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders)
• Repatriation
  • The process of moving refugees back into their home country or region
  • Difficult process
  • Moving Sudan refugees back to home country after cease fire agreed upon by government and rebel groups in Dafur region
    • Infrastructure destroyed; transportation difficult
    • Security to make refugees feel safe
    • Legal system to handle refugees property they want back

Why do people migrate?

• Ernst Georg Ravenstein
  • British geographer in the 1880s
  • Came up with 6 laws of migration in a paper in 1885
• Ravenstein’s laws
  • Most migrants travel only a short distance and toward major cities or industrial areas
    • Centers of absorption
  • As migrants move toward these centers of absorption, they leave gaps, which are filled by migrants from farther away
    • Flow from more remote to less remote areas
  • Flows of migration also create counter flows that take people away from the cities, but in less numbers
    • Become too crowded in cities
  • Long-distance migrants are more likely to be heading to a major cities
  • Urban residents are less likely to migrate than are people who live in the country
  • Women migrate more than men, but they tend to migrate shorter distances
• Distance decay
  • More interaction among places that are closer than far away is expected
  • Known as Zipf’s Law
• Gravity model
  • Interaction between two cities is a function of the population of the two cities and the distance between them; two large cities will have more interaction than a large and small city
• Step migration
  • Instead of moving far away, migrants will move close to home, then farther way, and so on until they reach their final destination
• Everett Lee
  • 1996, came up with push pull model of migration
• Intervening obstacles
  • Variables that a migrant must consider when weighing the pluses and minuses of a potential move
  • Cost, difficulties of crossing borders and obtaining visas, psychological difficulties of breaking ties with friends and family.
• Life cycle
  • People are more likely to migrate at critical times in their life
• Intervening opportunities
  • Amount of migration movement between two places, A and B, is affected by the number of other possible migration destination that a migrant leaving A can choose from before reaching B
• Factor mobility model
  • Model that argues that differences in wage rates cause people to migrate from low wage areas to high wage areas
• Human capital model
  • People move not just for macroeconomic reasons but also for individual reasons

Consequences of Migration

• Large numbers of migrants can lead to significant challenges for receiving or sending areas
  • Housing demands could not keep up with migration in 1830-40s New York City
• Consequences can be categorized as demographic, economic, or social
• Demographic consequences
  • When migrants change the basic structure of a population
  • US pop. Is increasingly Hispanic and Asian because of immigrants from Latin America and Asia
    • Population expected to triple by 2050
• Economic consequences
  • Can be positive or negative
  • Population levels in Europe rose in Industrial Revolution, migrants were welcomed in US and Canada relieved strain on European society
  • Undocumented workers
    • Some anti-immigration groups’ studies: Illegal immigrants cost Arizona over $2 billion a year in health care, education, lost taxes, and public services
    • Advocates counter saying government benefits from the taxes immigrants pay and the benefits of companies to hire cheap labor
    • 2010, debate grew as Arizona tried harder to identify illegal immigrants
  • Migrants can bring skills to their country
    • In US, rural areas, small towns, and poor urban areas rely on foreign trained doctors and nurses willing to work for less than normal, although higher than in their home country
    • Special visas allow migrants to remain in country longer than normal
• Social consequences
  • Migration brings one group of people in contact with another
  • Brings both better cultural understanding and discord
  • Know nothings
    • Many New-Yorkers were anti-Irish, considering their English origin
    • Residents also anti-Catholic.
      • Irish immigrants mistrusted, hated, given jobs too dangerous for slaves
    • 1840s Know-Nothing party rose to power in Boston with strong anti-Irish agenda
      • Held many positions
      • Leaders implemented anti-Irish laws, such as forcing students to read from Protestant King James Bible
    • San Francisco, two Irish immigrants lynched
  • Cuban Chinese restaurants
    • United States Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from country, 1882
    • Immigrants went to other countries such as Cuba and other Latin American countries
      • Chinese already in America started to leave because of growing anti-Chinese sentiment
    • Communist revolution in 1959 (Fidel Castro)
      • Chinese fled to America, most popularly New York with its Chinatown
    • Chinese had by this time adopted Latin and Caribbean culture, language, and food
    • Several Cuban-Chinese Restaurants remain today

Migration History of the United States

• Understand migration in three ways
  • When people migrated
  • Where they came from during particular time periods
  • Where people settled during each time period
• Colonial period
  • 1600 to American Revolution
  • Two categories of migrants
    • White northern and western Europeans
      • Before 1790, mainly were from British Isles
      • • England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales
      • Settled mostly in New England and Southeast
      • Hudson Valley and Middle Atlantic States settled by more diverse groups such as German and Dutch
      • South and Southwest settled by Spanish
    • African slaves
      • 360,000 Africans migrated before 1790
• First wave of European immigration
  • Occurred between 1800 and 1880
  • Nearly all immigrants from western and northern Europe
    • Mainly England, but also Germany, Scotland, France, and Ireland
  • Scots-Irish
    • Scots who migrated to Northern Ireland from the seventeenth century onward, then later to North America
    • Most were Protestant, unlike Irish
  • Nearly all settled on East coast
    • Only territory controlled
    • Railroads after 1840s allowed settlement of new frontiers such as Appalachians, western Pennsylvania, western New York, and Eastern Midwest
• Second wave of European immigration
  • 1880 to 1921
  • First serious immigration restrictions passed into law
  • Immigration reached hundreds of thousands per year
  • Primary change was origin
    • Western and Northern Europe shift to Eastern and Southern
    • Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Hungarians, Russians, and Greeks
    • Many moved to eastern cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and new York
    • Many also move to Midwest and Great Plains

Citation

Notes taken from: Malinowski, Jon C., and David H. Kaplan. Human Geography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. Print.